I hear you, and to this I often think:

- libraries pay retail for their copies

- many people can then read them for free, so the authors (and let’s be honest mostly they publishers) doesn’t get a dime either beyond the initial sale

- used book sales, there are many online bookstores (most owned by Amazon but stealthily) that have millions of references which you can purchase for a fraction of their initial price. Nobody but the seller gets money from this either.

How is it any different? Someone paid retail for their copy which they then shared. Kinda how a library would do it. Ok scale, maybe, although I suspect if you aggregated the loan stats on all the world libraries, you might land in the ballpark of the downloads on AL (I’d expect)

Not being flippant but seriously pondering.

In the UK and many other countries, Public Lending Right pays authors for books in libraries (with varying details from country to country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right

Not taking any stances here, but the difference is a library book can only be used by one person at a time, and it eventually wears out and has to be replaced.

Neither of those are true for digital works.